TV: The OA (2016)

Story as portal, participation as power

If the big sci-fi films give us integral hints on grand, cosmic canvases, The OA brings the whole question down to basements, school corridors and empty houses in the American suburbs. It’s quieter, stranger, and in some ways more radical.

Series 1 follows Prairie Johnson, who reappears after seven years missing, now calling herself “the OA”. She gathers a small group of damaged locals – four boys and a weary teacher – and tells them a long, improbable story about angels, near-death experiences and a sequence of movements that can open portals between worlds. By the final episode, they’ve learnt the movements and perform them during a school shooting, apparently disrupting the attack and allowing the OA to be shot – and perhaps transported – elsewhere.

What makes this integral rather than merely odd?

First, the series lives in a constant tension between structures:

  • Magic: NDEs, visions, inexplicable survivals, early premonitions. The world is full of signs and presences that don’t fit within ordinary causality.

  • Mythic: OA’s story is structured as an initiation tale: chosen child, descent into captivity, gathering of companions, revelation of a higher calling (“angelhood”).

  • Mental: Hap the scientist tries to capture all this with gas chambers, recordings, data. The FBI and OA’s adoptive parents suspect manipulation, trauma, psychosis. The boys themselves oscillate between belief and scepticism.

The integral move is that the series never allows any one of these to win cleanly. Hap’s science is both precise and grotesquely limited. OA’s myth is both sustaining and possibly delusional. The events in the final scene can be read as miraculous, coincidental, or tragically absurd. The viewer is refused a comfortable vantage point.

Second, The OA takes seriously something most television ignores: the power of shared story and embodied ritual to change what becomes possible.

OA doesn’t give her five new information in the usual sense. She gives them:

  • A narrative that reframes their own suffering as part of a larger pattern.

  • A clandestine space in which to gather and practise attention together.

  • A choreographed sequence of movements that requires trust, vulnerability and persistence.

Whether or not you believe her cosmology about angels and portals, something undeniably real happens to the group. They become more connected, more awake, more capable of acting together under pressure. Their final dance in the canteen is laughable from the outside – gawky teenagers performing odd moves in front of a gunman – but it is also coherent, courageous, and unexpectedly effective.

From a participatory-ontological perspective, the point is not “do the movements literally open a door to another dimension?” The point is that by acting in concert, in a pattern given by a story they share, the group modulates the field of events. The shooter is disoriented, the sequence of moments bends just enough for an unarmed cook to intervene. OA is shot in the chest, as if answering a call she’s been moving towards all along.

Third, the series renders time and narrative as two sides of the same thing. OA’s long tale, told night after night in the abandoned house, is not a neutral recounting of the past. It is a shaping of the present and an opening towards a possible future. The more the five listen, the more their own subjective states shift. Reality thickens.

In Gebser’s terms, that’s an integral, aperspectival move: time is no longer a line you look along from a single point, but something you can become more or less transparent to. OA’s childhood death, her captivity, her escape and her final shooting all feel like facets of a pattern that we cannot yet see whole, but which is clearly more than linear cause-and-effect.

So Series 1 of The OA marks the irruption of the integral by:

  • Insisting that the imaginal is real in its own mode, and that what happens there has consequences in ordinary life.

  • Showing how consciousness is fundamentally relational and field-like: the power lies not in OA as an individual, but in the group that forms around her.

  • Refusing to settle the status of the story, leaving the viewer to inhabit the tension rather than retreat into cynicism or credulity.

In a culture that treats stories as content and rituals as curiosities, The OA quietly suggests that both might, in fact, be technologies of participation. And that is as integral as it gets.